He took with him Peter, James and John, and began to be horror-stricken and desperately depressed.

It’s hard to imagine Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of the world, being “horror-stricken and desperately depressed.” And yet, it happened. Jesus was facing the greatest test of His time on earth, and He was facing it as a human being.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around the concept of Jesus being both fully divine and fully human, rather than being some sort of a spiritual half-breed.

But if there are any doubts about Jesus being fully human, his anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane should put those to rest. He knew what He was about to face, and He needed strength to get through it. Matthew’s account of this episode words it this way:

He took Peter with him and Zebedee’s two sons James and John, and began to be filled with anguish and despair.

Then he told them,“My soul is crushed with horror and sadness to the point of death. . . stay here. . . stay awake with me.” (Matthew 26:37-38 TLB)

Despair.

The One who was the Light of the World, who came to bring hope to everyone in it, was filled with . . . despair.

So considering this, is it any great wonder that we can feel despair when we face our moments of greatest testing?

And to take that one step further, usually when we are having our moments of fear and torment, the worst thing that we are facing is the unknown. We are scared, because we wonder what is going to happen. Will I have the strength to endure this trial? What will people think of me if I fail? What am I about to lose? Do I really want to know the answers to these questions?

Jesus didn’t have the luxury of fearing the unknown. He knew EXACTLY what was about to happen. And it scared Him. A lot.

Let’s be clear about this. Jesus, the Son of God, knew why He had come to earth. He knew He had work to do, and He knew He had to finish that work.

But Jesus the son of Mary and Joseph said this:

“Father, if it is your will, take this cup of suffering away from me. However, your will must be done, not mine.” (Luke 22:42 GW)

Jesus knew going into this time of prayer what God’s answer was going to be. He knew what He had to do, but He was NOT excited about it.

Nevertheless, He submitted to His Father’s will. He did not want to go through with His arrest, torture and execution, but more than that, He did not want to go against His Father’s will.

The Greek word regarding God’s will in this sentence is ginomai. This signifies that Jesus is not only saying that God’s will must be done, but that it must be. In other words, God’s will is eternal, just as God is eternal.

Perhaps this knowing was the greatest reason for His despair? He knew He wasn’t getting out of this. I can’t even imagine what He must have felt like in the garden.

And yet, He remained submissive, because He never lost focus on what His greatest mission was. And that was simply for God’s will to be done. Jesus was sincere about completing His work. He isn’t just saying “Your will be done,” to sound pious, like it’s the right thing to say while praying.

It is, of course, the right thing to say, but it is also the right thing, period.

Because God’s will wasn’t about Jesus the man doing something He didn’t want to do. It was about Jesus the Savior bring God’s plan of salvation to fulfillment:

Jesus Christ did the things God wanted him to do. And because of that, we are made holy through the sacrifice of Christ’s body. Christ made that sacrifice one time—enough for all time. (Hebrews 10:10 ERV)

This sacrifice began not on the cross, but in the garden, when Jesus made up His mind to be in agreement with God’s will. Because of this resolution, and the confirmation of His purpose that it signified, we are able to approach God today as His adopted children.

But this is about more than our salvation. Heaven will be awesome, of course, but what about the here and now?

Do you ever have situations that you know you won’t be strong enough to face by yourself? Isn’t it helpful to know, then, that even Jesus needed to be strengthened not only by angels and the Holy Spirit, but also His three best buds? It is much less difficult to say to God, “Your will be done” when you have your closest friends surrounding and supporting you.

It is not likely that any of us will ever have to face a crucifixion, and we DEFINITELY won’t ever have the weight of the sins of the world upon our own shoulders.

Nevertheless, when I am faced with something I really don’t want to do, and fear is holding me back, it helps at least to know that the God to whom I pray knows a thing or two about fear and apprehension.

The truth is that God does answer prayer, but not always in the way that we expect.

Sometimes we get excited and run up ahead when He needs us to hold back and notice something He wants to show us. Sometimes selfishness creeps in and the “desires of our hearts” become more like the cravings of our appetites. And sometimes, we simply don’t recognize the answer for what it is when it comes.

God is not a vending machine or an ATM. We exist to serve Him, not the other way around. For this reason, the point of prayer isn’t primarily to address our own needs. Jesus explained it this way:

Don’t worry and say, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’The people who don’t know God keep trying to get these things, and your Father in heaven knows you need them.Seek first God’s kingdom and what God wants. Then all your other needs will be met as well. (Matthew 6:31-33 NCV)

Prayer is your Out box. When you put something in your Out box at work, do you pull it back and put it in your In box again? No, you put it in the Out box because you are finished with it.

Whatever it is that you are praying for, God has a plan for it. It may not be the plan you would have scripted for yourself, but think for a minute. Who’s smarter, you or God? Don’t you think it might be possible that Father knows best?

There’s more to it than that though. Logic alone will tell you that God is bigger, more powerful and more able to meet your needs. The question is, “Do you TRUST Him to do that?” Do you believe that He not only knows what’s best for you, but that He WANTS what’s best for you?

How you answer that question will determine how you respond to His answers. If you really believe that God’s way will lead to a better result than anything you could have come up with, then it becomes a lot easier to roll with the changes when they do come.

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4 NIV)

This is one of the more misunderstood passages in the Bible. It’s easy to see why. Who doesn’t want to get the desires of his or her heart? Who has ever watched an Aladdin movie without wondering what it would be like to be able to rub a magic lamp and have a genie pop out to grant your wishes?

Unfortunately, many people have looked at that verse above, keyed in on that last part, and subsequently transformed God in their minds to little more than a genie in a lamp.

If you’ll notice though, this verse is a conditional statement. To get the desires of our hearts, we must first “take delight in the Lord.” So maybe we should be focusing more on what that means instead of our own selfish desires?

To “take delight” obviously means, “to enjoy.” But what is it we should be enjoying exactly?

In this life, we may have great memories of time spent with our dads. Dad can be our fishing buddy, our baseball coach, our source of worldly wisdom, etc. Many people, of course, have never been able to have a relationship like this with their fathers, but many of those wish that they had.

The relationship with our heavenly Father is different though. He is Abba, but He is also Adonai, which means, “Lord.” As Lord, we serve Him, but as Daddy, we serve Him out of grateful love, not just reverent fear.

When we realize that our service to God is not to avoid punishment but to please our Daddy, then the service itself becomes a joy. God isn’t looking for slaves to command. He wants His kids to look up to Him as if to say, “Did I do a good job, Daddy?”

To be able to hear God answer in the affirmative, we would of course have to have done what He wanted us to do. And to have doing God’s work be a delight instead of a chore, we would first have to WANT what He wants.

Looking at it this way, we begin to see that “the desires of our hearts” have little to do with our desires, but more to do with our hearts.

When we trust Jesus to be the Lord of our lives, He begins a transformation process inside us, gradually conforming us to His image. As we change, our hearts change to become more like His. As we see things more and more from His perspective, we begin to want what He wants—for ourselves, for others and for the world.

Once we get to this place, it is much easier to discern what God’s will is. THEN, when we pray, knowing that our will is in agreement with His, He gives us what we ask for, because it was what He wanted for us in the first place.

If you think about it, when do we ask anyone for anything? It’s when the one we are asking either has or can get something we want but don’t have. When Jesus tells us to ask, He is simply giving us permission to do so.

Along with asking, Jesus tells us to seek. He tells us this to let us know that God not only can be found, but He WANTS to be found.

For this reason, Jesus also tells us to knock, not just once, but persistently and insistently. Jesus is basically giving us carte blanche to be a pest in seeking out God and petitioning Him with our requests.

He is telling us that we aren’t going to wear God out or bore Him to death by bothering Him with our concerns. This is because God wants us to see Him as someone that we can approach.

But really. . .ANYTHING we ask for?

It is clear from the context that it isn’t so much the substance of our entreaties to the Lord as our motivation for asking that is more significant.

Remember, we are not God’s spoiled brats, but His adopted children. He chose us for His family, but we also had to choose Him as our Father.

The very nature of the relationship that Christians have with God is one of complete submission. We ask of Him because He has not only the power and authority but also the WILL to give us what we ask.

However, the more we are in submission to God, the less likely we are to ask for something selfishly. If our primary motivation is to please Him, then we would be more likely to ask for the kinds of things that He would want us to have.

(So what kinds of things are those? Come back for Part 3—The Desires of our Hearts.)

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. (1 Corinthians 6:12 NIV)

I’m free to choose who I see any old time

I’m free to bring who I choose any old time

Love me hold me love me hold me

I’m free any old time to get what I want

“I’m Free” Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

One of the main functions of a father is to establish and enforce boundaries for his children. The intent of setting these boundaries is to protect his children, because he knows more than they do.

There is no condemnation in this, only a sense of love and protection. The child picks up on this, and remains content within the security of the boundary.

Now if an earthly father can manage to set healthy boundaries in love, how much more effective and useful are our heavenly Father’s boundaries! Would it not stand to reason that an omniscient God, who knows every possible outcome of every possible choice we could make, would know what’s good for us and what isn’t?

The most obvious example of this is the 10 Commandments. A lot of people are put off by them because of the “Thou shalt not” tone that most of them have. So why would a loving Father God put such restrictions on the freedom of His children?

One word—consequences.

LIBERTY DN= FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES

Some consequences of violating God’s boundaries are obvious. Take for example “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” If you break that commandment, the most obvious and immediate consequence is generally the breakup of a marriage.

Long-term and indirect consequences are difficult to predict, however. We can’t know for certain how young children will be affected by the divorce—how they will cope with the sense of loss, how they will develop socially as they grow, what baggage they might carry into their future relationships and marriages.

God sees every potential negative consequence, and wants to protect us from them. Nevertheless, our nature instinctively reacts to any kind of boundary as a restriction on our freedom. Christian or not, nobody likes being told what to do, or to have their “freedom of choice” taken away.

But when you stop to think about it, this is a ridiculous notion. NOBODY can take away your freedom of choice, not even God. He’s the one who gave it to you in the first place.

Boundaries

God doesn’t set boundaries to take away our choice. He places them there to assist us in making the right choice, because he knows which choices will have good consequences and which will have bad consequences.

However, somewhere along the line our culture developed a callous disregard for sin, or crossing God’s boundary lines, and its consequences. Our culture has been brainwashed to believe that God’s boundaries, as set forth in the Bible, are out of date and out of touch with progress.

Since the Bible is God’s Word, and therefore our most definitive written source of Truth, this Truth gets dismissed along with the Bible. Inside this moral vacuum, people get the idea that they can create their own truth—a moving target that is relative to whatever suits their whims at any given moment—and anything contrary to that amorphous worldview then becomes a violation of their civil liberties.

Only here’s the problem. Since Truth is universal, and it’s found in the same place where God’s “restrictive” boundaries are, then it would follow that the consequences of crossing those boundaries are also universal.

The consequence of mentally turning sin into civil liberties is that to do so, the concept of civil responsibility is totally abandoned. You can’t be “free to do what you want any old time” and be your brother’s keeper at the same time.

You may have heard it said of the Bible “The Word is alive,” or some variation thereof. Scripture says of itself:

For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power—making it active, operative, energizing and effective; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit, and of joints and marrow [that is, of the deepest parts of our nature] exposing and sifting and analyzing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12 Amplified)

However, this is only possible through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the third person of God. Scripture is nonsense and babbling to those who attempt to read it without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Now if you are a non-Christian reading this, let me bring you up to speed on the concept of the Trinity. God exists as one God in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They are One God, not Three, which is a very difficult mystery to wrap your brain around. Here are a few illustrations that have helped me.

An apple has three parts: the peel, the flesh and the core. The three parts have different purposes, but they are all still one apple, not three apples. (This illustration is from a book called 3 in 1 (A Picture of God) by Joanne and Benjamin Marxhausen. I found it for my daughter at a rummage sale—at a Catholic household, oddly enough.)

Another illustration about the Trinity is H2O. If you drop an ice cube onto a very hot skillet, it will quickly melt and then evaporate. But for a few seconds, you will have water in all three states: ice, water and steam. All three are water, and all three exist in the same place at the same time, but each one has unique characteristics and purposes.

Finally, the unique purposes of the Trinity have been explained to me by the following illustration. A father and son are reading quietly in their living room (it could happen!). They are so into their books, and they have been reading for so long, that it’s starting to get dark. Dad is comfortable, and he is also Dad, so he says to his son, “Go turn on the lamp.” The son gets up and turns on the lamp, and they continue reading by the light it gives.

The father gives the command, the son carries it out and the power gives light. In the same way, God the Father gave a command (Let there be light), the Son carried it out (And there was light) and the Holy Spirit brought light to the world.

This is how God has worked, and still works, in our world today. The Father’s greatest work since the creation was to redeem the world and humanity with it. He gave the order for atoning work to be done to bring us back to Him. This order was carried out by the Son, who came to the world in the person of Jesus Christ. And on the night He was betrayed, Jesus explained how the work would be completed in us:

And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter (Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Strengthener and Standby) that He may remain with you forever, the Spirit of Truth, Whom the world cannot receive (welcome, take to its heart), because it does not see Him, nor know and recognize Him. But you know and recognize Him, for He lives with you [constantly] and will be in you. (John 14: 16-17 Amplified)

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, He made good on His promise:

And when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all assembled together in one place, when suddenly there came a sound from heaven like the rushing of a violent tempest blast, and it filled the whole house in which they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues resembling fire, which were separated and distributed and that settled on each one of them. And they were all filled—diffused throughout their souls—with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other (different, foreign) languages, as the Spirit kept giving them clear and loud expression (in each tongue in appropriate words). Acts 2:1-4 Amplified)

Now what does all this have to do with Catholicism?

Well, the Catholic church obviously does acknowledge the existence of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, they acknowledge Him every time they make the Sign of the Cross, in which they silently (or aloud) say in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Any Catholics reading this, you just said “Amen” didn’t you? Admit it!)

But as for me, growing up, I didn’t really know anything about the Holy Spirit. He was whose name I said when I touched my shoulders whilst crossing myself. That was it.

Catholics do, of course, know about Jesus. They know who He is, how He died, and that He rose again, which are key elements in the Gospel. But do they know Him?

I can only speak for myself here, so I will do that. I did not know Jesus when I was a Catholic, either as a child, or later as an adult.

God the Father is revealed through the Son, the Son is revealed through the Word, and the Word is revealed through the Holy Spirit.

The Catholic church does indeed reveal the Father through the Son. Jesus as the Son of God is taught. There is no doubt in my mind that any Catholic with a brainwave knows who Jesus is. Therefore, they know of the Father.

But do they know the Father? The Father is revealed through the Son, who is revealed through the Word. The only way you can know what is in the Word is to be in the Word yourself.

God’s work from His creation to our redemption is recorded in the Bible, which was written by men under the inspiration (literally, “God-breath”) and guidance of the Holy Spirit. As Paul said:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV)

So the Bible is God’s book about God’s plan to redeem God’s creation written under God’s inspiration by God’s people of old for God’s people throughout the ages, even unto this present age. Understanding this, is it any wonder that the Bible cannot be understood without God’s guidance?

In my adult Catholic life, I decided that I was going to read the Bible cover to cover, as though it were a novel. I had received a very nice bound Bible from my aunt at my confirmation nearly 15 years before, which had never been out of the box.

So one day I decided that I was going to read it front to back to see what was in it. It was a King James Version (I’ll pause here to wait for the Baptists to stop laughing at the concept of a Catholic trying to get through Leviticus in the KJV—if you’ve tried that, you know where I’m coming from).

No matter what the translation, it’s a good bet that if you’ve ever tried to read the Bible like that, you probably made it about 1/3 of the way through. If you did manage to get through the Pentatuech (the first five books), then you probably got bogged down somewhere in Chronicles and gave up.

Obviously, the Bible wasn’t meant to be read this way. Even in a modern-day, prose-like paraphrase such as Eugene Peterson’s The Message, you’re still going to struggle with the “thick parts” near the beginning. Unless you’re an architect, you’re probably not going to find much life application in the pages describing all the dimensions and details of the tabernacle or the temple.